Water Falls
by MrsTater
Summary: The Battle Of the Seven Potters bereaves Tonks of her mentor after an attempt on her life. The aftermath. Remus/Tonks, Adult Content


_Originally written for the March 2008 "Not Forgotten" ficathon at RT Challenge, for the prompt "distance," this story is a "missing moment" from chapter five of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The italicized excerpt at the beginning are JK Rowling's words, not mine--if they were, I'd call him Remus, not Lupin ;). Many thanks to **Godricgal**, who deserves the title World's Best Beta. Really._

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**Water Falls**

_Lupin set down his glass upon a side table, and addressed Bill, "There's work to do. I can ask Kingsley whether--"_

_"No," said Bill at once, "I'll do it, I'll come."_

_"Where are you going?" said Tonks and Fleur together._

_"Mad-Eye's body," said Lupin. "We need to recover it."  
_

_"Can't it--?" began Mrs. Weasley with an appealing look at Bill._

_"Wait?" said Bill. "Not unless you'd rather the Death Eaters took it?"_

_Nobody spoke. Lupin and Bill said good-bye and left._

They walk quickly away from the house towards the edge of the security barrier, broomsticks slung over their shoulders. Not a sound comes from the two men except the swish of their cloaks with each stride, so Remus doesn't miss the creak of the Weasleys' kitchen door opening, followed by the thump of it closing again, nor is he surprised. The telltale scuffle with the Wellington boots abandoned by the stoop, and the muttered _bollocks_, are unnecessary to his knowing it is Dora who has followed.

He stops, and turns, and opens his mouth to tell her she's not to come with them, but his vocal chords stretch taut and mute in his throat at the sight of what had been jaunty pink spikes of hair now drooping about her heart-shaped face; the moonlight picks up ends that have turned a grizzled dark grey, reminiscent of the fallen warrior on whom his wife's mind fixates.

_His wife. _

Scarcely more than an hour has passed, Remus realises, since Dora was perched on a Muggle clothes washing machine, flashing her wedding ring at Harry with a sparkle in her dark eyes as brilliant as the diamond set in the gold band on her finger.

As she approaches now, Remus sees that her eyes are still bright, though not with that velvet glow of bridal bliss, or even with the tears she wept so quietly for Mad-Eye in the Burrow. They are hard, hard as the fists into which her hands are balled, one clutched around her wand; her eyes flash dangerously, no doubt with pictures supplied by her imagination of herself carrying out justice, swift and sure as her footsteps across the lawn.

Remus' heart hardens with the same desire to avenge their comrade, to exact fitting punishment upon the bastard who killed the greatest Auror of the age. But that bastard is Voldemort, and the thudding of his heart in his chest reminds Remus that he is lucky, so incredibly lucky, that it is still beating.

It beats for her, for Dora, who tonight lost the mentor who was dear as a father to her.

Dora, who tonight was nearly lost to her husband of just two weeks, almost cut down by her own aunt.

The honeymoon is over.

"No." Remus catches her wrist as she reaches into her robes, presumably for her Reduced broomstick.

"No?"

"You're not coming."

For just a second she looks surprised--no, shocked--and then wide eyes narrow, somehow darkening beneath sloping eyebrows.

"Like hell I'm not!"

"Really, I think it would be better if you--"

"Stayed behind with the women and children?" She begins to struggle against him. "If this is about Bellatrix and your bloody protectiveness, I thought you'd got over that before you married me. Merlin _damn it_, Remus, let go of me!"

He releases her, realising as his fingers uncurl from around her slender wrist how tersely he's spoken to her since her broomstick skidded to a halt in the yard mere minutes ago. She'd thrown herself into his arms, and he'd been too choked by relief to speak. And yes, Bellatrix _has_ been a niggling thought ever since, because her murderous intent means they _know_, the Death Eaters know about the marriage, and it is as he feared, Dora's life is in danger because of _him_--

No.

She was always in danger; she was Ted Tonks' daughter before she was Remus Lupin's wife, the child of Muggle-born Ted Tonks and blood traitor Andromeda Black. Bellatrix has tried to kill Dora before tonight.

The image of Dora's limp body falling down the risers in the Department of Mysteries is hardly more comforting than the one of her falling from her broomstick, down, down...

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and, glancing up to see dark clouds brooding on the horizon, Remus feels the fat droplets of a summer shower on his skin.

"It _is_ about protecting you," he begins; when Dora opens her mouth in argument, he lets his broomstick drop onto the damp earth and takes her face in his hands.

"Dora, Mad-Eye fell a long way."

Despite the implication that Mad-Eye's death is too gruesome--_too much_--for her, Dora gives a slight nod of understanding, and there is a look of gratitude in her eyes as her face turns almost indiscernibly paler. Then, beneath his fingers and palms, tension coils in her jaw, her neck. Her chin tilts upward, jutting, her shoulders jerk back in defiance.

"You've _got _to find him, Remus."

"I'll do my best. And the next time we meet the Death Eaters, believe me, I won't stop you doing your worst. Although you may have to fight _me _for Bellatrix, as I feel I owe her two or three myself."

She gives him a tight, grim smile, and then Bill is calling to him with great patience and Dora picks up Remus' broomstick, places it in his hands, and shoves him gently.

"Get on with you, then. See you at home."

"Sir, yes, Sir," Remus says, with a salute.

He doesn't need to tell Dora to be careful going home, to disguise herself, but he does anyway, and as he turns away from her, fingers clutch his sleeve and tug him back. He just catches a glimpse of her pale face--battle hardness gone from it, her youthful features instead etched with lines that tell of a wife afraid this might be the last time she sees her husband alive--before she embraces him tightly, and presses a quick, awkward kiss to his stubbled cheek.

"The area will be crawling with Death Eaters," she murmurs in his ear. "Be safe, Remus."

And then she pulls back, all soldier once again.

"Well? What are you waiting for? Go!"

* * *

When Remus arrives at home, hands empty of even a scrap of Mad-Eye's cloak, the flat is dark except for the strip of light beneath the bathroom door. The shower is running. He imagines Dora coming into the flat not long before him, stiff and sore from two broom rides and a battle, as he is, and shivering with the coldness of grief and fear, seeking refuge beneath the rain of hot water--which adds a new ache to the many he as acquired this night. The thought of that same cleansing relief, and of burying himself in Dora's wet, warm body, leads him into the bathroom.

Steam hangs in the air so thickly that he cannot see the shower three feet in front of him, much less Dora behind the clouded glass. She doesn't speak, so he isn't sure whether she heard him come in, even though the door badly needs an Anti-squeaking Spell--the first item Tonks put on his domestic DIY list when he moved in, which he never thinks of at a convenient moment. Or maybe she simply doesn't know what to say to him, as he realises is the truth in his case.

He listens to the slap of the water against the tiles, and at last says, "I suppose one of us ought to ask the other a security question."

Yet over the shower sounds, he makes out her sharply indrawn breath, followed by a long, sighing relief. He can almost picture her body relaxing against the shower wall.

The voice that rings off the tiles, however, is anything but.

"Do you know what Bellatrix said to me during our little game of broomstick chase?" Dora asks.

"That...is not something to which I've been privy."

"She said she couldn't decide whether it would be more fun to kill me herself, or to capture us both and feed me to you next full moon. She asked if you'd mind her playing with your food first."

"Well that's..."

_Sick_, he's going to be sick. Remus bends over the sink, one had clutching the porcelain basin as the fingers of the other rake into his shaggy hair, pulling it back from his face. He cannot go on, though Dora apparently doesn't expect him to.

"Bellatrix said all that," she goes on in quavering tones of agitation, "and I still couldn't manage to hit her with a single bloody curse."

Remus opens his mouth to utter reasonable and unhelpful words about the difficulty of flight combat, but Dora speaks again.

"Reckon all her hatred for my mum and me and the men we love leaves any room for her to care that her own husband's injured?"

Bitterness accents Dora's voice like a broken attempt at speaking a foreign language, but it is followed by the sound of flesh squeaking against glass; Remus looks up to see her familiar dark-eyed face peering at him through a smudge in the steamed-up shower door. Her brown hair is plastered against her head, and her eyes take him back to that day last March when she found him after the Montgomery attack.

"When I think how close you were to that curse that took George's ear..." She straightens up, and her hands fist at her sides, jaw jutting as it had at the Burrow. "Molly told me it was _Snape_--"

"Let's not think about it anymore for now." Remus moves toward the shower, and begins to unbutton his robes. "Harry is safe--"

"And Mad-Eye's dead," says Dora, her voice a battleground for control. "Merlin knows what the hateful bastards will do to him."

It is impossible to tell whether she's crying as she stands beneath the rain of hot water, not brushing away the rivulets that roll over her nose and cheeks, even into her eyes. She's so rigid--a soldier who hasn't been given leave to stand at ease. Is she waiting for Mad-Eye's orders?

Remus puts his hand to the glass where the steam hasn't yet quite filled in the window. He finds Dora's thumbprint, and thinks he can feel her pulse in it, the twitch to hold her wand, to fight. He was with her after the Department of Mysteries, the Battle of Hogwarts: in her hospital bed she had vowed to kill Bellatrix for Sirius; once they had recovered from the shock of Dumbledore's death, she had made similar utterances about Snape. Dora may fall in combat, may be stunned by grief, but if she has proved anything to Remus in these two years, it is that she is an Auror not merely in occupation, but in the depths of her heart. She will pick herself up, pull herself together, and soldier on because she must--because she needs to.

He wonders if this is why she was Sorted into Hufflepuff. Or another reason why, anyway, as her loyalty undoubtedly is.

"Remus..."

Her words beckon his eyes to hers again, and through the glass, soldiering and loyalty and need converge into man and woman, husband and wife, _lovers_--who have only each other left in all the wide world, who nearly lost one another tonight, who have already had too many close shaves, who might well lose each other tomorrow.

Remus strips off his clothes, and Dora nearly knocks him down with the shower door when she opens it just as he's stood awkwardly on one foot, bent to peel off his sock. It's so ludicrous that they have to laugh; they stifle their mirth quickly out of reverence for what has happened tonight, for what is Obliviated from his mind by the sight of water dripping off the ends of her hair, making slow, curling paths over her shoulders and down her chest, beading on the tips of her dark pink nipples which harden as cool air sweeps through the open shower door.

Before Remus can think, he steps under the nearly scalding spray of water, not sure whether he's shut the door behind him or not because it's impossible to be sure of anything but her tongue sliding roughly along his and her hands stroking him. When she grips the backs of his hips, pulling him as close against her as she can, it's too much. Before their lovemaking has scarcely begun he's hoisted her up and settled himself the cradle of her legs, so warm that he notices how cold the tiles are against his palm and the arm he keeps behind her to cushion her as best as he can from the hard surface as he thrusts in to her; and they are so desperate for each other that it's over even quicker than they started, their cries as they come ringing out with startling clarity over the drum of the water.

They remain together for some time. She runs her fingers through his hair, her knees press his sides in an embrace, and the heels of her feet in the small of his back keep him pushed deeply inside her. Her small, round breasts are at the level of his mouth, so he kisses them, licks the hollow between, suckles at her nipples. She half-moans, half-whispers his name, and if he could he would love her again right here, right now, but he's spent, and his limbs are trembling, so he reluctantly slides out of her, untangles her legs from around him, and sets her on the wet floor of the shower.

Even then they continue to hold each other. She tucks her head beneath his chin, and his eyes follow the path of the running water down her pink hair, over her flushed, slender body, to the swirling puddle around their feet. For a little while, at least, he can almost believe trouble washes away as easily as the water rushing down the drain.

Tonight, the honeymoon isn't over.

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_**A/N: Reviewers will get to have their own steamy moment with Remus. In the shower, or the bath, if you prefer, or a more G-rated version, with a nice cup of tea. ;)**_


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